Olufemi Obafemi

Olufemi Obafemi (born 4 April 1950) is a Nigerian poet, playwright, author and Professor of English and Dramatic Literature at the University of Ilorin since October 1990. He is the 76th recipient of the Nigerian National Order of Merit (NMOM) award (2018). He was the President of the Nigerian Academy of Letters between 2016 and 2018, when he was succeeded by Francis Egbokhare. Quotes The idea of going abroad to study was not even one of our most distant dreams as young students. Names like Wole Soyinka, JP Clark and soon being abroad were to us some special names with talismanic wonder. Not to talk of the fairy stories of an Azikiwe in the thirties, stowing away to America in Lincoln or Awolowo borrowing money to study in UK. In my time in the seventies, and with the kind of opportunity put on our laps as young university teachers offered on a platter of gold called Staff Development in which Graduate Assistants with a Second Class Upper or higher being sent abroad to study after just one year of teaching, going abroad had become a reality—for the exceptional students and young teachers was golden. The University of Ilorin just started with us as first set of teachers, under government higher education policy in the north—I think something close to that may have happened in the Western Region, but with us, in the northern States, it was a real occurrence for young graduates in the academia. All you need to do was to apply. The educational system and standards were equivalent with what obtained happened in the universities in the United Kingdom especially. You did not need to write any examination or qualifying examination to attest to your proficiency in English. Our Cambridge exams or General School Certificate, Advance Level, which was used to admit us to Nigerian universities was also used to gain admission to the UK, even for the Bachelor degree. All you needed to do was to apply, send a copy of your degree certificate, with a letter of recommendation from a senior person in academia, preferably a Professor and your admission letter came. As soon as you secured your admission, the University authority in IIorin, on the recommendation of your Head of Department and your Dean, gave you the Staff Development Award which was nearly enough for your studies for the Masters. If you did well, and your supervisor at the doctoral level certified that, you continued your studies until you finished. So, to Sheffield I went and later to the School of English, Leeds. Your salary was also paid to give you a comfortable stay abroad. This must breed a load of nostalgia in our present system nowadays! With these opportunities, I secured admission to the University of Sheffield in 1977 and went off to Leeds in 1978 for my doctorate. I have been to a number of universities in the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States, and Africa, especially South Africa and Ghana. Apart from my Study years in England, I have returned there a few times as a Vising Scholar and have given a few guest talks in a few British Universities. My visits to the other countries were short visits. None was more than three or four months at a time. I found my student life quite interesting. I had very good relationships with my supervisors in Sheffield and Leeds. Both Professors Christopher Heywood, a South African Africanist Professor and Professor martin Banham, certainly one of the most humane and genuine Africanist scholars I have ever encountered. My time in Sheffield was nearly wholly spent studying for my MA, specializing in African Literature. Outside of the classroom, the experience was not as pleasant. In fact, it was nearly traumatic given the kind of racism that I faced in 1977. Imagine a young man, fresh from Africa and the kind of cold attitude that I confronted in the trains, bosses and taxi cabs, in the bitchy coldness of Winter. I found that I had freedom to use three seaters in the car or the bus as people fled for me once I entered as if I was leprous or carrying a contagion. At that stage, the racism was not subtle at all, even though it was not official or overtly institutional. The worst part of it was the second degree racism or is it xenophobia that my friends and I, especially Bengal Owojaiye (now a retired Director of FAAN) suffered in the hands of two Afro-Caribbean girls with whom we shared a flat on Marlborough Road in Sheffield. It was a very rude shock. If you refer to the experience in the buses, as culture shock, how could one define the experience of black girls originally from Trinidad or Jamaica, I cannot remember now. We got there and felt a great relief—that you have escaped from the city racism to the warm hands of Blacks like us. They carried on their shoulder an unearned, unmerited feeling of superiority that was totally unimaginable. They were ashamed to share a bathroom with us, so they woke up about dawn, every morning, to scrub the baths for hours before using it, if we were the last to use it the previous night! We just managed not to commit murder, the level of our fury mixed with disappointment. We had to stand up to them verbally, until they fled. These were girls who were studying for their OND, feeling superior to comfortable Nigerian postgraduate students from the biggest part of Africa. Besides, it was still in the days where landlords were unwilling to give their houses to blacks to rent—the kind of experience Whole Soyinka described in that beautiful poem, ’Telephone Conversation’. Inside the campus, and in the refectory, life was free and enjoyable. It felt like not going back to the streets through the buses or going back to the house. We spent free time in the pubs where real human beings carried on with their lives. In the seventies, racism was still quite raw in Britain, never mind governments, public diplomacy and anti-racism laws. In those days, it was not every night club that a black man cool stroll into for cooling off, no matter how impeccably cut their three pieces were.